13 September 2017
This is the display of the inquiry (historia) of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that things done by man not be forgotten in time, and that great and marvelous deeds, some displayed by the Hellenes, some by the barbarians, not lose their glory, including among others what was the cause of their waging war on each other.
Herodotus, Histories, I.1. Translated A.D. Godley
Hecataeus the historian was once at Thebes , where he made a genealogy for himself that had him descended from a god in the sixteenth generation. But the priests of Zeus did with him as they also did with me. They brought me into the great inner court of the temple and showed me wooden figures there, for every high priest sets up a statue of himself there during his lifetime. The priests showed me that each succeeded his father. They went through the whole line of figures, back to the earliest from that of the man who had most recently died. Thus, when Hecataeus had traced his descent and claimed that his sixteenth forefather was a god, the priests too traced a line of descent; for they would not be persuaded by him that a man could be descended from a god. They traced descent through the whole line of three hundred and forty-five figures, not connecting it with any ancestral god or hero, but declaring each figure to be a "Piromis" the son of a "Piromis"; in Greek, a good man.
Herodotus Histories, II.143. Translated A.D. Godley
As to the speeches which were made either before or during the war, it was hard for me, and for others who reported them to me, to recollect the exact words. I have therefore put into the mouth of each speaker the sentiments proper to the occasion, expressed as I thought he would be likely to express them, while at the same time I endeavoured, as nearly as I could, to give the general purport of what was actually said. Of the events of the war I have not ventured to speak from any chance information, nor according to any notion of my own; I have described nothing but what I either saw myself, or learned from others of whom I made the most careful and particular enquiry. The task was a laborious one, because eye-witnesses of the same occurrences gave different accounts of them, as they remembered or were interested in the actions of one side or the other.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, I.22.1. Translated by B. Jowett.
Spread and influence of Greek (Hellenic) culture
Alexander the Great's empire at his death, 323 BC
The Hellenistic Kingdoms c.200 BC
Alexandria on the Oxus (Ai-Khanoum, Afghanistan)
Hellenistic objects from Ai Khanoum: (top left) olive oil storage jar with Greek inscription; (bottom left) gold starter of Baktrian king Eukratides; (centre) head from a plaster sculpture, C2 BC; (right) bas-relief statue of a youth, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.
Hoplite warfare
There was one people in the world which would fight for others' liberties at its own cost, to its own peril, and with its own toil, not limiting its guaranties of freedom to its neighbours, to men of the immediate vicinity, or to countries that lay close at hand, but ready to cross the sea that there might be no unjust empire anywhere and that everywhere justice, right, and law might prevail.
Translated E.T. Sage (Vol. 9, p. 367)